Wednesday, July 8, 2015

New York times: Scorsese, MoMA, and The Third Man

I don’t know that I always appreciate my New York
experience as much as I might, and that may be because my idea of going
outdoors is to bury myself in a movie theater for two or three hours at a time.
Every once in a while, though, events conspire to remind me I don’t live in
just any city. I live in New York City. Thanks to Martin Scorsese, the Museum
of Modern Art, and the Film Forum, yesterday was full of those events.

Scorsese is probably the highest-profile leader of the
film preservation movement, spearheading The Film Foundation, which is
dedicated to keeping the history of the medium alive in an ever-evolving
landscape. The organization’s top priority has been the restoration of classic
films shot on highly volatile nitrate film stock, but the movies themselves are
not the only precious evidence of the art form.

In that vein, the New York Museum of Modern Art is hosting
“Scorsese Collects,” an exhibit of 34 classic film posters from the Scorsese
Poster Collection. The pieces run the gamut from Michael Powell and Emeric
Pressburger’s gorgeous The Red Shoes
to John Ford’s The Searchers to
Scorsese’s own Mean Streets. The
beautiful collection is a tribute to an increasingly lost and marginalized art.

Though small, the exhibit is a must-see for any film
fan. I was absolutely giddy with delight to be within inches of each well
preserved artifact of film history. There were a number of highlights,
including a dangerous, sexy one-sheet for Jacques Tourneur’s classic Cat People and a wonderfully
impressionistic take on Elia Kazan’s Best Picture-winning On the Waterfront that foregrounds the violence and brutality of
the film’s story. Perhaps, though, the most essential work is the simplest: the
iconic “Veronica Lake’s on the take” poster for Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, as perfect now as
the day it was designed.

In the center of the room, there hangs a 6- or 7-foot
tall poster for Carol Reed’s magnificent The
Third Man, the imagery for which focuses on the stunning climactic foot chase
through the Vienna sewer system. I have seen The Third Man five or six times, though never on the big screen,
and while staring at the film’s promotional art, I remembered the NYC Film
Forum was screening the film through the end of the week. That was all I
needed, and I headed out the door of the museum, caught the train downtown, and
settled in for two hours of one of the greatest mystery movies ever put to
celluloid.

If pressed to name the top 10 films of all time, I
would put The Third Man right there
in the conversation, and its wonder only grows in proportion to the size of the
screen showing it. The stark, Oscar-winning black-and-white cinematography
still stuns, the writing is razor sharp, and Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles
provide two of the great screen performances of the sound era. Welles, in
particular, is just luminous, a true movie star, as commanding a presence today
as he was when the film was released in 1949.

After the film, my girlfriend – kind enough to indulge
me in a day of classic film nostalgia – and I strolled over to Washington
Square Park, where to our surprise, the New York Jazzharmonic was giving its
debut performance as part of the Washington Square Music Festival. All in all,
I am not sure there was a more New York way to close out an art-filled day. It
cannot happen every day for everyone, but sometimes, man, New York City really comes
alive.